Following Paulo Freire: In Search of Educational Dialogue

Abstract

The article is devoted to the transformations of the teacher’s roles in the context of the alternative education. The idea of the “pedagogy of the oppressed”, presented by Paulo Freire in the book under the same title, has been presented in details. A short outline of the book’s history has been given. The social and political roots of the education as the tool of oppression have been shown. The banking concept of education has been criticized as the one that contradicts the idea of freedom and democracy. The author reinforces the idea that democratic changes of education gave start to different alternative visions of the teacher’s role, which were expressed through different approaches to the education that constituted branches of the alternative pedagogy. As it is shown in the article, antipedagogy, critical pedagogy, Gestalt pedagogy, emancipation pedagogy, transgressive pedagogy questioned the teacher’s traditional role of being the only source of knowledge able to pass it to students as objects of teaching. Different changes in the teacher’s roles have been demonstrated: the neglected one (in antipedagogy), the one of the transformational intellectual assisting in criticizing everything (in critical pedagogy), the thoughtful facilitating partner (in Gestalt pedagogy), the child’s self-actualization supporter (emancipation pedagogy), the dialogue learning organizer (transgressive pedagogy). The author draws the conclusion that the teacher’s role has been transformed with the stress transferredfrom teaching to learning; when both the teacher and the student are partners in their reciprocal learning.